1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a technique of selecting an image of an operating system (OS) to be cached in advance in a data processing system used for provisioning.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the related art, clone installation is known as a method for realizing fast provisioning. According to this method, a plurality of types of disk images of computers in which predetermined operating systems (OS)/applications are installed in advance is prepared on a repository server, and a required disk image is selected from the repository server during provisioning and copied to a provisioned computer.
However, transmission of a complete disk image through a network requires a lot of time. Moreover, when numerous resource requests are processed at the same time, a bottleneck may occur in the repository server, and the processing may be delayed.
US Patent Application Publication No. 2008/0201414 (hereinafter “Amir Husain”) discloses a technique of accelerating the processing by transmitting only differential data of the image file of a virtual machine when virtual machines are transmitted between a server and a client.